How Did Grievous Almost Become Force Sensitive and Dooku's Sith Apprentice?

Dooku had the dying Grievous transfused with blood taken from the corpse of Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas, whose midi-chlorian rich blood was meant to do more than keep him breathing. It was an experiment in midi-chlorian transplantation. The blood held Grievous together long enough for the Geonosians to rebuild him, but it produced no Force sensitivity whatsoever, and Grievous carried that failure for the rest of his life.

Dooku set the crash up#

Nothing about the accident was an accident. In Legends, Darth Sidious spotted the Kaleesh warlord as a candidate to lead his droid armies because of his skill in warfare, and told Count Dooku to recruit him. Dooku went to San Hill of the InterGalactic Banking Clan, who had a history with Grievous already since the Kaleesh had once run the Clan's droid army before leaving to fight a war back home.

Hill, Dooku and the Geonosian leader Poggle the Lesser worked out something better than recruitment. They would cripple Grievous and rebuild him as a cyborg under their control. An ion bomb went aboard his shuttle Martyr, and the ship was altered so that Grievous would be ejected when the charge went off rather than simply vaporised.

It worked. Grievous was mortally injured, and by the time Dooku reached the crash site he was already dying. A heart stun kept him alive just long enough to be shipped to Geonosis. While the body was in transit, Dooku made a detour to his own homeworld of Serenno to collect something he had been saving.

The blood of Sifo-Dyas#

Serenno was where Dooku kept the corpse of Sifo-Dyas, the Jedi Master who had been removed from the High Council for holding views the rest of them judged too extreme. Sifo-Dyas had once been Dooku's friend, and in Legends his body ended up on Dooku's world after his death at the desert moon of Oba Diah.

That corpse was still full of midi-chlorian rich blood, and Dooku brought it to Geonosis. The transfusion went into Grievous during his reconstruction, run openly as an experiment in midi-chlorian transplantation. The theory was simple enough: load a body with enough midi-chlorians from a powerful Jedi and see whether the Force follows.

It did not. The midi-chlorians helped save his life, which was no small thing given the state he was in, but they granted him nothing else. Grievous woke up with a Jedi's blood in him and no more connection to the Force than the battle droids he would go on to command. To San Hill and his partners the experiment was a triumph, because they had the general they wanted. To Grievous it was a personal failure he never let go of.

What they built instead#

If he could not have the Force, they gave him everything else. On Geonosis, Poggle the Lesser's scientists implanted his brain and eyes into a duranium alloy body modelled on an ancient Krath war droid. The legs were LX-44 units with magnetised talons. The two electro-driven arms could split at the dislocating shoulders to make four, each hand carrying a pair of opposable thumbs. What was left of his organs went into a synthskin gut-sack sealed against vacuum.

They worked on the brain as well, and they did it against his wishes. The Geonosians trimmed away memories they judged disturbing, enhanced his rage centres, sharpened his equilibrium so he could use the new body's speed, and installed a kill-switch operated by Dooku personally. The finished product was faster, angrier and easier to control than the man who had gone into the operating theatre.

Grievous hated it. When Dooku handed him his new title of Supreme Commander of the Droid Armies along with his first lightsaber, which was Sifo-Dyas' own weapon, General Grievous responded by slaughtering every MagnaGuard in the room and shouting that he was not a droid. He then carved himself a new death mask in armorplast, modelled on the one he had inherited from his father, and had it grafted onto his alloy skull.

Apprentice in name only#

Dooku trained him. The Legends continuity counts Grievous among Dooku's apprentices with the qualifier that matters: lightsaber apprentice. Dooku taught him lightsaber combat personally and turned him into a genuinely dangerous duelist, good enough to hold his own against Obi-Wan Kenobi repeatedly and to fight Mace Windu evenly during the Clone Wars.

Sith training was never on the table, because none of it works without the Force. What Dooku got was a weapon he could point at the Jedi Order and switch off if it turned on him, which is a useful thing for a Sith Lord who intends to eventually replace his own master. Under the Rule of Two, an apprentice is always calculating. Dooku kept a close watch on his general regardless, sending his servant Vulpus to observe him whenever Grievous started running cyborg experiments of his own.

The relationship stayed sour. After Grievous failed to kill Kit Fisto in his own castle, Dooku's assessment was that there was room for improvement, which is about as close to contempt as the Count ever got in public.

The lesson Palpatine took from it#

Sidious watched the whole experiment and drew his own conclusion. Dooku had spent enormous effort building a superior cyborg body and had ended up with a commander who resented his handlers, ignored orders when it suited him, and could only be controlled by a switch.

When Palpatine came to build his own cyborg apprentice out of what was left of Anakin Skywalker, he did not repeat the exercise. Darth Vader's suit was nowhere near the machine that Grievous got. No four arms, no enhanced agility, no vacuum sealed frame. Just enough to keep a man alive, in pain, and dependent on the master who built it.

That is the real answer to the Grievous experiment. It failed at making a Force user, and it succeeded at teaching the Emperor exactly how much power he should never hand an apprentice.